Hotel and catering workers: class and unionisation

Abstract

A coherent theoretical class analysis of hotel and catering workers can provide a systematic means by which to explain the behaviour of these workers in reaction to their employment. By examining the class relations within this industry, the paper challenges the notion that hotel and catering workers are in any sense unique, but rather, suggests that the economic role that these workers serve is as much a function of capitalist relations of production as that of workers more commonly associated with high levels of unionisation. Though recognising that real structural barriers exist impeding union growth and leading to individualised forms of resistance among workers, the paper sets out to emphasise that the antagonistic industrial relations arising from the work situation of hotel and catering workers can at the same time provide a fertile ground for more collective forms of resistance thus laying the basis for higher levels of unionisation.